


Harbor

by waldorph



Series: Author's Favorites [6]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-08
Updated: 2010-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-07 02:58:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's hot.  The desert is spare.  It's unyieldingly a desert, even this more habitable section.  Twisting, stubborn trees and brush, a low, open house in Old Vulcan style.</p><p>Spock doesn't ask questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harbor

**Author's Note:**

> prompted by **screamlet**: Jim retired, under 2k

It's hot. The desert is spare. It's unyieldingly a desert, even this more habitable section. Twisting, stubborn trees and brush, a low, open house in Old Vulcan style.

Spock doesn't ask questions.

Jim's regulation-issue bag hits the floor, and the door closes behind him.

Spock is writing a paper. Jim sleeps, stretched across the foot of the bed.

When he wakes up his mouth is like sandpaper and he says, "Did it have to be fucking Tyree?"

* * *

"This is awful."

"It is the tea of my people."

"Cultural sensitivity isn't going to make me lie and tell you this doesn't taste awful. It's like…I don't even know what this taste is."

"It is Vulcan tea. That is it's taste."

Jim's face won't break if he smiles, but he's not willing to test that theory.

* * *

"—Convince him to accept the promotion. We need good men, and Captain Kirk is the finest man we've got, Spock, surely—"

"Captain Kirk is unparalleled as a commander. However, it is not in my power to persuade him to do anything."

"He won us a war, Spock."

"At great cost."

A beat. Jim closes his eyes, fists his hands in Spock's comforter and lays flat, tries to melt into the bed.

"If you see him…" the sentence hangs in the air. Spock doesn't reach out a hand to take it.

"Good evening, Admiral."

* * *

They play 3-D chess.

"Your moves are predictable."

Jim looks at him. "They won once."

"The war is over."

He knows that. He still wants it to do over.

Spock wins every time, and Jim only changes strategies when Spock tells him he's going to stop playing.

It's the only thing that feels familiar and safe.

* * *

"I don't remember getting this old."

Spock looks over, tilts his head and his eyebrow. "You have aged in a natural progression of years."

"That's hilarious. I mean—god. I used to be good-looking."

"You are still attractive."

"I look like Pike did."

He flinches at his own reflection: he doesn't want to talk about it. He picks up one of Spock's books of Vulcan poetry and settles on the porch, and opens it to where he left off. It's slow going, but slow is all he's equipped to handle.

* * *

Jim plants things. Grows out a beard, wears old jeans and a black tee and takes the anti-grav vehicle Spock bought with his retirement money (a lie: Spock is a millionaire in all the planets—a Vulcan princeling. Jim had laughed about that, when they were stupid and young). He lets the old men and women drag him around the market (old: twenty years older than him, maybe thirty), showing him what will grow.

He gets a sunburn. Spock rubs lotion into his back with his bare hands, and Jim is too tired to shield. Spock feels like harbor: Spock is Jim's _only_ harbor.

"I want to forget," he says.

"I know."

If he was still twenty-five—hell, forty, this would be the point where he'd turn into Spock, kiss him and make it dirty, laugh when Spock yielded with a long suffering sigh, like he's put upon.

He's fifty.

He gets up, and goes into his room.

* * *

Spock crawls into bed with him when Jim has been there for four months. He's not hard: he's not groping. But he slides Jim's shirt up so that his hands make contact with skin and breathes, shaking and on the verge of falling apart, into the nape of Jim's neck.

They don't say anything. Jim just wraps his arms around his stomach, fingers brushing Spock's, and goes to sleep.

When Jim wakes up he makes breakfast.

The only edible part is the goddamn Vulcan tea.

* * *

The music that's always playing is soft and sweet. It's like a memory: it's like the memories of people who didn't go through hell. It's like finding out there is a god: there's redemption and an afterlife and things are okay in the end, if you try hard enough.

Spock hums along, sometimes.

Jim sits on the couch and stares up at the paneled ceiling and listens, every atom in him straining, waiting for the right note. The one that will let him fly apart.

* * *

He goes running. At night, when the desert is cool, he goes running.

Some days he comes back on his own.

Some days Spock's feet crunch on the sand, and he sits down beside Jim and they watch the horizon line. Hold onto it like drowning men, or maybe that's just Jim.

* * *

He's in the market when he sees a vendor: gets some meat—beef maybe. Takes a bite and gags: the smell, the whiteness of the bone.

_Bones_.

Drops it and runs, blind.

Spock looks up when he bursts into the house, falls on the floor.

Wraps long arms around him and lets him cry into his shoulder until he can't breathe.

Doesn't comment when Jim starts ordering all-vegetarian foods from the replicator, just hands him vitamins.

* * *

Jim has died forty seven times. None of them has taken.

Leonard McCoy died once. It took.

They told him, after they'd put him back together: taken him from the wreckage and made him whole again, good as new, that he was lucky.

He'd been stuck in the bunker (what was left of it) for nineteen hours. Sulu had stared at him in shock the entire time.

Sulu never blinked.

Chekov's eyes were closed.

* * *

"I once tried to drive a car off a cliff."

"I once piloted a spaceship filled with a highly reactive substance towards a ship that would surely destroy me."

"I jumped."

"I was pulled."

Of anyone Jim's ever met, Spock gets it.

"I am glad—" Jim starts, stops, works past the scrape of his throat. "I'm glad it was never you."

Spock looks at him. "I am grateful that you have survived as well."

It's enough.

* * *

Spock only was promoted to Captain when it became clear that another captain was necessary. Spock and Sulu were promoted to Captain. Chekov and Rand went with Sulu; Uhura and Chapel went with Spock; Jim kept Bones and Scotty.

They'd joked. Mommy and Daddy were splitting up and the oldest kid was moving out: who got the other kids? It was funny. The transcripts of the three ships (_Enterprise_, _Excelsior_ and _Essex_) are funny. Stuff that's studied: three ships working so perfectly together, captains anticipating and interacting effortlessly.

Jim Kirk, who was Captain, but really Admiral of his own fleet of three.

They were thirty-five, then. And for ten years…

"No matter how hard you stare at it, I do not believe the door capable of opening on its own power," Spock says.

"I am working on my telekinesis."

"That suggests you had some ability prior."

Jim throws a grin over his shoulder. It's been a year: it doesn't feel so foreign.

* * *

"Go to town," Spock says.

Jim glances over at the security system: probably illegal to monitor the skies like this. They're fucking war heroes: who's gonna arrest them?

He can ID over seven hundred vessels of Klingon, Romulan, and Federation make. He goes to town.

He gets back and Spock is sitting at the table.

"They warned me that you are unstable."

"Did you tell them you knew that?"

Spock's eyebrow flicks a grin at him, and he stands, takes Jim's face in his hand and kisses him. It's familiar, so fucking—Jim closes his eyes, puts his hands on Spock's hips and lets him in, anything, anything.

"You are not unstable, Jim."

* * *

Mutually assured destruction is an amazing thing. It's not perfect peace, but it gives governments wiggle-room.

Crazy captains who hijack ships they're technically no longer in command of who threaten to kill the Klingons while his former first officer very seriously convinces the Romulan settlement that it is perfectly logical for him to detonate a self-destruct sequence of his own ship over the senate building tend to help that.

Desire for peace is not weakness.

Romulans openly speak of Spock, son of Sarek, in glowing and admiring terms.

Klingons want James T. Kirk extradited for war crimes.

The Federation pardoned Captain Spock.

James T. Kirk is technically on the run.

* * *

"My father is dead." He's packing up. Their lives fit into the bags they came in, which is stunning, and perhaps not. Spock has a home that mimics his ancestral home on Vulcan II, a position waiting on the Vulcan High Command. Jim hasn't ever really had a lot of stuff: hasn't ever been stable enough to need it.

"I'm just saying—"

"We are married."

"—That maybe it's not—"

"The Federation must recognize the union."

"—A good idea."

"Jim."

_"What?"_

"You have immunity."

"I'm not afraid of them." It's a lie, but he's horrified that it is. He shouldn't be afraid. He's James T. Kirk.

It's just that that finally means something to him. He can look in the mirror. It took three years on a desert planet in the middle of nowhere, but he can do it, now. They don't—they don't have the right to take this from him.

"Indeed not."

"I'm a kept man," he realizes.

"You are, but I find you aesthetically pleasing to keep around."

A beat. "Did you just call me eye candy?"

* * *

"Councilor Spock, welcome home."

"Thank you, Councilor Stonn. This is my bondmate, James Tiberius Kirk."

"I grieve with thee, Kirk."

Vulcans felt the war more personally than anyone else, Jim knows. If not for Nero, there wouldn't have been a war. His fingers tangle with Spock's, and he nods.

"Thank you."

"The President of the Federation sent me a transmission requesting that we send James Kirk to Earth for trial," Councilor T'Pring says. Spock's former betrothed, Jim remembers. Dissolved when he didn't come back to New Vulcan.

Pon farr.

Good times.

Jim looks at Spock, drops his hand: he's already ready to run. Spock reaches out and grips his wrist.

"We have declined the request," Stonn tells him. "It is illogical to try you. T'Pring is going to the Federation to illuminate the matter."

"I leave in three point seven hours," she agrees. She reminds Jim of T'Pau: he thinks he remembers they were related. He's…grateful that she's on his side.

* * *

It feels like starting over again. Spock is a High Councilor, and he fits it. Fits into Vulcan high society.

Jim, who's never fit in any society he didn't create around himself, somehow manages to slot in here.

T'Pring doesn't yank her kid out of his hands. When Spock has councilors to the house, they engage him in conversation like his opinions mean something (which he thinks is fucked, because some days he doesn't even think his opinions are coherent).

* * *

"You will catch cold."

"Not my fault I follow you to stupid desert planets."

"That argument is specious."

Spock stands behind him. "You were always meant to be a captain."

It aches. It's a physical burning ache, not to be out there, but he can't. Can't do it without remembering how Uhura sounded when she died, the echoing silence on Scotty's end of the comm. Without seeing the skies on fire.

Went crazy and made Spock follow him: won the war but couldn't come _home_ because where the fuck _was_ home? It's a little mortifying that home isn't a where, it's a who.

"Whatever our lives might have been if the time continuum was disrupted - our destinies have changed," he says.

"I was very young when I said that." Spock sounds sheepish, it makes Jim grin.

"But you said it with such _gravitas_."

"At the time it was a grave realization."

"I was laughing at you, on the inside."

"You are always laughing at me."

"With you." Jim turns in the circle of his arms, kisses him. _"With you."_


End file.
